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28 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
peated acts of nonviolent resistance to war and systems of oppression. She was last arrested
at the age of seventy-three in the struggle for fair working conditions and just
wages for California farm workers. Always a teacher, her disciples have included
Daniel Berrigan, Robert Coles, Cesar Chavez, Michael Harrington, Thomas Merton,
and others. She has been generally acknowledged as the founder of the Catholic
left in the United States.
In honor of Dorothy Day’s one-hundredth birthday on November 8, 1997, eight
members of the Open Door gathered with some four hundred Catholic Workers in
Las Vegas. The three-day celebration culminated with a Mass and civil disobedience
at the Nevada nuclear-test site.
The following is an adaptation of Murphy Davis’s talk at the Las Vegas
gathering.
I come to celebrate the life of Dorothy Day with a sweet sense of irony. It
amazes me when I remember that I spent several years studying church history.
Ed’s Ph.D. is in American church history, and I was working in the same area;
but in all our studies in seminary and graduate school, we never once heard of
Dorothy Day. It was only after we left the academic life that we began to hear of
her life and work. Now I look back over the last twenty years and realize that no
one person, living or dead, has had a more profound effect on my life, my work,
my belief. This formidable woman, this Yankee Catholic anarchist, has been a
primary source of conversion for this born-and-bred Southern Presbyterian!
In 1977, Ed and I read William Miller’s A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy
Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, and knew that we wanted to learn more.
In 1979, we went to New York to try to raise funding for our work in Georgia
with people on death row. We knew that we wanted to visit the Catholic Worker
while we were in town. When our free afternoon came around, we were tired
and grumpy but got ourselves together enough to get to Maryhouse. Mike Harank
was “on the house,” and he generously took time away to sit down and talk
with us. When he heard that we had interest in starting a work of hospitality, his
advice was simple: (1) the work should have its foundation in love, and (2) we
should always keep it small in order to preserve hospitality and personalism. As
Mike spoke at length about love as the beginning and ending point, my grumpiness
began to melt away, and the tears began to roll down my cheeks. My heart
of stone softened, and the more Mike talked, the harder I cried. I’ve often
thought of that conversation and wondered what Mike must have thought of
this Southern woman dissolving in a puddle of tears in the newspaper office in
the front of Maryhouse. But after a while, he gave us a big stack of Dorothy’s
books, and we were on our way.
The following fall we opened the Clifton Presbyterian Church night shelter.
A year later we visited the Catholic Worker again, this time with our infant
daughter, to spend a week deepening our understanding of this movement that